Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday March 05, 2010 @12:44PM
from the quark-gluon-plasma dept.

runagate writes "Brookhaven National Laboratory has created a heretofore unknown form of matter. The matter we normally encounter, and are composed of, has nuclei of protons and neutrons that contain no strange quarks. It was known that anti-strange matter could exist, and using the Solenoidal Tracker at Brookhaven's RHIC, scientists detected a couple of dozen instances of antihypernuclei. The 'Z' axis of the Periodic Table has already been extended in the positive direction by the discovery of hypernuclei, but this new discovery extends it in the negative direction for this new type of 'strange' antimatter — which may exist in the core of collapsed stars and may provide insight into why our universe appears to be made almost solely of matter and not antimatter." The Register's coverage reproduces a helpful diagram.

when this new form of matter comes in contact with the normal matter that the rest of the universe is made of? Do we get a gigantic explosion (as we would with matter and anti-matter), of do the particles just avoid each other like the plague?

The linked article at the register, with the helpful diagram, kinda makes that sentence make sense. It also has gems like '“The strangeness value could be non-zero" [in such places] says Chen, a statement with which no doubt most would agree.'

We've known for quite a while that this sort of thing is possible. All quarks have the exact same strong interactions, after all. This is like strontium displacing calcium in bones -- it's got the same valence structure, it has similar properties, and it's no surprise that it happens.

RHIC is a nifty machine for a lot of reasons. It provides an experimental counterpart to lattice QCD calculations of the equation of state of the quark-gluon plasma, which is the natural state of the universe at very high temperatures. But "OMG! An antistrange wound up in a bound state!" isn't why this machine is worthwhile, even if it does give El Reg something funny to write about.

The light from your headlights will be, as far as you're concerned, travelling at the speed of light. As in, the light coming out of your headlights will go zipping out in front of you in the blink of an eye, not crawling in front of you as if they can barely keep up.

Yet, a 'stationary' observer would see the light travelling at the exact same speed. If they had a device that could measure how fast the light was travelling, and you had a similar device, and measured the same light coming out of your headlights, both devices would read the exact same speed.